


The Whirligig of Time

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Forehead Kisses, Ghosts, Haunting, M/M, Post-Canon, Survivor Guilt, Time-Looping Through Dreams, bittersweetness, came back wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 09:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18808261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Jack's not sure if he's more haunted by his memories or by the silent, lingering ghost of Gus Balfour. And then Gus is dead but his ghost lingers, Jack blames himself, and everything is dreadful until it's slightly less so.





	The Whirligig of Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adnauseam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnauseam/gifts).



 

> Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely   
>  Each one demand an answer to his part   
>  Perform'd in this wide gap of time since first   
>  We were dissever'd.
> 
> -William Shakespeare,  _The Winter's Tale_ 5.3

Jack has a ghost problem.

He tries to ignore it, but it becomes impossible, and he is certain that he will not be able to escape his ghost by any of the usual methods. Drinking is futile, for the fuzzy effects of alcohol only serve to make the boundary between reality and whatever liminal space the ghost exists in blurry and unpleasant. He tries to sleep, but sometimes he dreams of a pair of cold eyes, watching him with remorse and reproach, and wakes sweating, certain the sea is swallowing him all over again. Jack supposes he could swallow a bottle of pills, or put a bullet in his head, and that would end it, this half-life of haunting and guilt, but he has no desire to die. It would, he thinks, disappoint his ghost. And that is something he cannot bear to do.

The ghost (he can’t bear to think of that sad, dripping spectre in the corner as Gus) doesn’t speak. It just sits in the corner, glowing a watery grey-blue, and always damp from head to sodding toe. It drips, a translucent ectoplasmic substance like some horrifying parody of water, and its hair is full of seaweed, its lips a darker blue.

This, Jack thinks, must have been what Gus looked like in his last moments, when the trapper of Gruhuken dragged him under, when Jack could not link their hands in time to pull Gus to safety. Gus must have drowned like this, filled with water and frozen-lipped. Jack loved this man, and now he is a ghost in the corner of a grim little cottage, far from the sea, but still leaking ocean into the carpet.

“Why did you follow me?” Jack asks for what must be the millionth time.

The ghost doesn’t say anything. It never does, which makes Jack feel halfway relieved and halfway cheated. The silence is eerie, but a ghost hooting like an owl in the corner would be worse than eerie, and Jack would probably find himself despising this ghost that was once Gus. Even now, without any wailing, he finds himself resenting the ghosts, as he once resented all the other members of the doomed expedition to Gruhuken. This silent, damp phantasm is only a memory of someone and something that was once a source of goodness and optimism in his life. Jack wants to cry.

Isak doesn’t care much for the ghost either. He growls at it sometimes, but he is not afraid. Perhaps he senses that this ghost is not a threat, merely an admonition, and thus, no danger to either himself or his master. If it could speak, the ghost would not do so ragefully. It is not the trapper of Gruhuken, and it would, in some brittle version of Gus’s comforting voice, say only one thing, very softly, and with so much pain in its eyes.

_How could you leave me to die?_

***

One evening, the ghost follows Jack to his bed. It floats silently up to him, and drips onto the bedspread.

“Go away,” he says, his voice heavy with tiredness and a bit sharp. “Go stand in the corner and judge me as usual.”

The ghost reaches out a waterlogged hand and presses it to Jack’s forehead. For a non-corporeal thing, it’s surprisingly cold, and Jack yelps. The ghost turns, and floats to its usual corner, where it stands again, looking at Jack with disappointed eyes. Jack falls asleep in the faint blue glow it casts.

He dreams about Gruhuken, which in itself, is not an unusual thing for him to dream about. The unusual thing here is how vivid and cold tonight’s dream-Gruhuken is, how dark. But the aurora is above when he steps outside, and Gus is there. There’s no sign of Algie.

“Gus,” Jack hears his dream-self say, “there is a ghost here. We have to leave.”

He wakes with a start, the ghost hanging over him. It seems more corporeal, somehow, present in a way it has never been before. It still drips, but the droplets look more watery, and less like a melting, phosphorescent jelly.

“What do you want?” Jack asks.

He’s not expecting a reply, so he’s slightly shocked when the ghost opens its mouth. There’s a gush of the watery jelly, and then, words.

“Thank you.”

It’s no more than a whisper, but the voice is unmistakably Gus’s.

“You can talk?”

His voice is too loud and too sharp in the early morning gloom.

“You brought my voice back for me,” the ghost (or should he think of him as Gus now that he can speak? Must he begin to think of the ghost as a man again?) says.

“How?”

“I brought you back to Gruhuken, or perhaps a Gruhuken that was. And then you warned me, which allowed me to get a bit of myself back.”

Jack is speechless. He must still be dreaming. Gus cannot be here, even ghostly, even barely corporeal. He only withstood the accusatory eyes of the ghost when it could just be the ghost. But this is not an it. This form, dripping its slimy jelly, this is Gus. He’s right there, and Jack reaches up a hand, against his better judgement.

He’s not sure what he thought would happen, but he feels only cold. His hand passes through Gus, as if he isn’t there. In that moment, all his dreams are dashed in icy water for a second time.

“Fuck!”

Gus laughs, a little sadly.

“I can talk, Jack, but I’m not human anymore. Not alive, really.”

And of course, Jack knows that that’s the awful truth. It’s all over for them. He’ll never be able to hold Gus, or tell him how he really feels, or do any of the thousand other things he dreamed about on Gruhuken when the night was dark and the trapper prowled outside. And all the while, Gus watches him, glowing that same poisonous blue-green. Is the ghost-- is Gus-- shivering? _Bloody hell._ What wintry temperatures could cause someone to shiver even in death? Did Gus die of cold before the water knifed into his lungs and cut out his breath forever? Jack will never know, because he was hauled aboard before he could save Gus, and before he could die with him.

Jack considers what he might say next, watching Gus’s ghost flicker and glow. There is so much he wants to say now that the ghost can talk, but the gulf of time and life seems impassible. Some half-remembered Shakespeare quotation floats through his mind, something about time from a play where a queen became a statue and was made flesh and blood again at the very end. It gives him a quick, half-formed idea he can’t help but voice.

“If you touched me on the forehead like that again, like you did last night, would I be able to go back to Gruhuken and bring back more of you?”

Gus smiles a little sadly.

“I don’t know. Probably shouldn’t risk it. You might wind up bringing back something worse than me.”

“I want to try.”

He has to try. There must be some atonement, some transmutation of his guilt into salvation, into some way to return more than just a voice to Gus. Jack pictures him solid and alive and warm to the touch, and it makes it all the more unbearable to see Gus as an incorporeal spirit, dripping and cold.

***

And Gus lets him try, night after night, touching his forehead with chilly fingers, and each night, Jack returns in his dreams-that-are-not-dreams to Gruhuken, and says whatever he may. There’s a tremendous litany of phrases, and each night, Jack adds to his arsenal: _There’s a ghost here. Escape. Don’t come back with the rest when Algie comes back for me. Please, please, save yourself, for the trapper of Gruhuken wants nothing more and nothing less than revenge._ But Jack cannot bring himself to tell the truth, and cannot say the three words that he most needs to speak.

Gus is a little stronger each night. His touch becomes less cold, and his hair drips less. He sits next to Jack during the evenings, and no longer radiates blue light so distinctly. There are times when Jack is even able to forget that he is talking calmly with the ghost of a dead man. But even as Gus grows more real and more warm, Jack weakens.

In his mind, it’s the aftermath of Gruhuken all over again, and he wakes with tears streaming down his face. He loses weight, and he is listless in his daytime work. When Jack returns home in the evenings, he says hello to Gus, attends to Isak, and immediately sinks into a troubled sleep. Given the chance, he would do nothing but dream and dream again, throwing himself back into the terror all over again for the chance to see Gus as a human and not as a ghost. He would neglect waking to bring another back to life.

And then, one night, as Jack dreams himself into the boat, rowing away from Gruhuken, he turns to Gus.

“I love you,” he says quietly, his breath pluming out into the cold air. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I do. Not as a brother, not as a friend. As, oh hell, you know!”

And then they are in the water, and it’s ripping Jack’s lungs open all over again, but he holds onto Gus’s hands, clawing himself to the surface, and praying that they will both survive until morning, though there’s something behind him pulling him down. The pressure becomes intense, and he flails out wildly against the dark water.

Jack wakes sweating, tears rolling down his cheeks. His room is his own, and he is alive, and yet it feels as though something has been cut from him. _If only I’d said that when he was alive._

“Gus?” he calls out into the darkness of the room.

“I’m here. Are you alright? You cried out in your sleep.”

Gus looks so very, very concerned when he comes over to the bed. He’s nearly solid, nearly human, and yet just so slightly translucent. He kneels by Jack’s bedside, and Jack almost can’t tell that he’s floating an inch or so above the floor. When he feels a cool touch at his forehead, he realizes that Gus is stroking back his hair, carding his hand gently through it. He leans into the touch, and flinches when he realizes that Gus is supporting him.

“You’re able to hold me up.”

Gus smiles.

“I’m more solid now. Thanks to you, it’s practically like I’m alive again.”

Jack nearly starts sobbing again. Instead, he just lies in his bed as Gus strokes his hair with cold, gentle hands. They’re so cold, and so gentle, and though these hands are far more solid than Gus’s touch has been before, this ghostly touch is still achingly inhuman. It’s with a sudden sharpness that Jack realizes, in this quiet moment, that he cannot dream Gus back into perfect existence. He will always be this melancholy, forgiving ghost, and the tears that Jack’s been holding in prickle at his eyes.

“My God, Gus, I loved you, and I never told you,” he cries.

“I knew,” Gus says quietly. “I wanted you to say something. I would have told you that I loved you too.”

“It’s too late. You’re dead, and you’ll always be dead, and I’ll always be wondering what could be different.”

Jack rubs at his eyes, furious at himself for crying. Gus still floats beside the bed, nearly solid, barely translucent. He’s weeping too, tracks of pale blue liquid, glowing the same shade his body once glowed.

“It’s not too late. I’m here. I’ll always be here, I think.”

Jack wants to protest that it’s not the same, but his words vanish when Gus presses a kiss to his forehead. He wishes he could draw him close, but Gus is ever so slightly insubstantial, just non-corporeal enough that his hands pass through when he tries. Gus smiles and inclines his head to kiss Jack gently upon the lips. It is fluttery and light, and Jack would call it a ghost of a kiss if he were in a more joking mood. The sensation is odd, both present and not, but somehow it is satisfying. It’s not the kiss Jack would’ve wanted, with both of them alive and breathing, but it is enough.

After a moment, they break apart.

“I’ll go back,” Jack says. “You’re almost alive again.”

Gus looks at him, sad and quiet.

“I can’t let you go back,” Gus says. “It’s hurting you.”

And Jack has to admit he’s right. He’s lost so much, and he cannot bear to lose all he has gained. Gus will never be alive again. But he will be present, and they can be happy. A ghostly hand brushes Jack’s flesh-and-blood one, and he smiles. It won’t be so terrible, this living with a ghost. Not when he loves Gus, and certainly not when Gus returns his love. They are together, and though it is different now than it was on Gruhuken, all will be well. Jack can live with a ghost, he thinks. He can put up with a little cold. Gus smiles, pale in the early morning light, and Jack gets out of bed, a slightly spectral hand linked within his own.

**Author's Note:**

> I adored your prompts! The idea of Gus coming back as a ghost has intrigued me since the first time I read the novel, and I really wanted to play around with that idea, as well as an idea of time loops and resurrection.   
> Title is from _Twelfth Night_.


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